How to Go From Making a Living to Designing a Life

After having struggled for so long, it took a shift in attitude for my family and me when success started to happen. When I started making a little extra money at age 25, my mentor Earl Shoaff taught me to also let it serve as a new inspiration for lifestyle.

It’s about changing your life as well as changing your skills and earning more money. It’s best to invest some of that early money in lifestyle. Go to the movies. Go to a fancy dinner. Take two vacations instead of one. Think of exciting lifestyle changes. Don’t miss anything. Just do some little extra things so this new commitment to earning more and becoming more inspires you, your family.

With that little extra money, work at creating a lifestyle, designing a life—social friendships, church, community, country, all those things that make a composite of our overall life. Start furnishing that with new vigor, vitality, money, whatever it takes to expand your life into what I call the good life.

Get excited about changing things. One discipline leads to another. One change leads to another. And when you feel good about yourself and start to make the turn to do something you’ve never done before, it starts to work. And then you get excited about changing other areas of your life as well.

Now, after you have made your fortune, the money and extravagance might not seem as big a deal. And fortunately you can then create even more powerful opportunities, opportunities for benevolence, philanthropy and giving.

I’m certainly not saying to focus only on external pleasures and rewards. Your relationships, health and spirituality are all of more consequence. But in the beginning, when the rewards of your hard work begin paying off, make sure and treat yourself and those closest to you to a new world of lifestyle and celebrations.